Kenneth Noland Quotes
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For me context is the key - from that comes the understanding of everything.
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The scene then as now was centered in New York. For the most part, I've kept a bit apart from that attractive and seductive city. I've done it by living in the country within commuting distance.
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Because of this the representation I'm interested in is of those things only the eye can touch.
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With artists of my own generation there was at first no group identity - and never a clique.
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In the 1950's there was a kind of agreement that a good artist would do something in his picture that acknowledge the edge, but it was a question of doing something when you got to the edge. Cropping was something new. It came from photography and from w:Clement Greenberg. It was resisted as being too easy.
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I think that we = Morris Louis and Noland realized that you didn't have to assert yourself as a personality in order to be personally expressive. We felt that we could deal solely with aesthetic issues, with the meaning of abstraction, without sacrificing individuality – or quality.
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Morris Louis and I were interested in how Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler famous for her soak-painting technique were using paint. Of necessity we had to get more interested in the stuff of painting. We talked a lot about whether to size the painting or not to size, how to mix up paint.
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Usually I throw away what I don't get right the first time.
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There are two things that go on in art. There's getting to the essential material and a design that's inherent in the use of material, and also an essential level of expressiveness, a precise way of saying something rather than a complicated way.
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Clem had made it known that Pollock was a great painter.
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I have to work things out by painting them. I can't just imagine what will happen. I have to do it and see it. That's the only way I find out if it will go anywhere.
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I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.
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Pollock was well known, certainly, but for all the wrong reasons. He was known as much for being wild and unconventional in his working methods as for being a great artist.
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Context begins with other artists - seniors and mentors.
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I had to find a way in each picture to change the drawing, shaping and tactile qualities to make these elements expressive; as the color had subsumed the possibility the possibility of these parts being on a equal basis of expressiveness.
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In the '50s Morris Louis and I were not known, David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler were not much known.
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I knew what a circle could do. Both eyes focus on it. It stamps itself out, like a dot. This, in turn, causes one's vision to spread, as in a mandala in Tantric art.
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We tend to discount a lot of meaning that goes on in life that's non-verbal. Color can convey a total range of mood and expression, of one's experience in life, without having to give it descriptive or literary qualities.
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I've also been willing to share any help that I could give to any other artist.
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I met David Smith through my former wife, Cornelia, who'd studied with him.
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You see things out of the corner of your mind or the corner of your eye that affect you just as strongly as things that you focus on, if not more so.
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Artists are mechanics who work with their hands, making things. Artists are involved with the means of creativity, the nature of skills, the revelation of making. Art comes from the work, I see a painting as an expressive entity. There's no picture that I know of where the subject carries as much expressive possibility as the actual execution of the picture.
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As time goes on, I realize more and more that, beginning in the early 30's, David Smith began setting the precedent for what was to come later for many of us.
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Picasso loved depicting. He didn't love painting. It's always more like filling in for Picasso. But you can see that Matisse loved the stuff. He loved making it thin, loved moving it around.